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• Breaking Down The Ending and Post-Credit Scene of <i>The Flash</i>

Breaking Down The Ending and Post-Credit Scene of The Flash

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Flash

The Flash , the latest installment in the DC Extended Universe out in theaters Friday, is all about multiverses, time travel, and multiversal time travel. As Barry Allen a.k.a. The Flash uses his super speed to travel back in time to stop his mother from being killed, he meets multiple Batmen (in a nod to the multiple Hollywood heavyweights who have played the role of Batman over the years) and learns what happens when you mess with history.

The Flash is the second-to-last movie in the current DCEU. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom will mark the final installment before co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran overhaul the DC film and TV universe . It’s unclear whether the Flash will return to the screen—or if Ezra Miller , who plays the superhero, will be recast in the role. Gunn has said The Flash will “reset” the DC Universe and that all the characters “will be connected.”

Here’s what happens at the end and in the post-credits scene of The Flash.

What happens at the end of The Flash?

The Flash is on a journey to prevent his mother (Maribel Verdú) from being killed—in turn, exonerating his father (Ron Livingston), who was accused of her murder. He shares his plan with the Bruce Wayne of his universe, played by Ben Affleck. Wayne advises him against the idea because, as multiversal stories go, messing with the past means potentially disrupting events in the future. Barry doesn’t listen to Batman and time travels anyway, meeting an alternate version of himself after successfully saving his mother. Therefore, the original Barry and, well, Barry meet Michael Keaton’s Batman , who explains to them that time is not linear and that changing events won’t just affect one point in time but events prior to that moment and beyond. It’s a confusing concept, but the effects of Barry’s actions become clear by the movie’s end.

After, Barry realizes that to ensure the safety of the space-time continuum, he has to travel back in time again to undo his own damage. At the end of the movie, he is able to get his dad to look at the security camera in the grocery store by rearranging items on the shelves, which corroborates his alibi, helping his father get acquitted and out of prison. Waiting at the courthouse, Barry receives a phone call from Bruce Wayne, who congratulates him on his father’s victory and says he’s pulling up to the courthouse. As Wayne steps out of the car, reporters and paparazzi crowd him. Barry, back in his own universe, is expecting Affleck’s Wayne to walk out of the car, but it turns out to be George Clooney. “Now, who the f-ck is this?” Barry asks, as the movie ends.

What is the significance of George Clooney’s cameo?

Clooney played Batman in the 1997 movie Batman & Robin , replacing Val Kilmer, who played Batman in 1995. Kilmer replaced Keaton, who donned the Batsuit in 1989 and 1992.

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Gunn has said that a new Batman and Robin movie is in the works as part of Chapter One in the revamped DC Universe. He said the movie will be centered around Batman and his son, Damian Wayne. While no casting announcements have been made for any of the films in the DC Universe overhaul, Clooney’s appearance in The Flash suggests he might reprise his role as the Caped Crusader. Our guess is that this is highly unlikely .

What happens in The Flash ’s post-credits scene?

A post-credit scene shows Barry taking a drunken Aquaman (Jason Momoa) out of a bar and trying to lead him back to his apartment to sleep it off. The drunk superhero falls face-first into a puddle and tells Barry to go and get more beer while handing him one of his rings. Barry refuses at first, saying, “This is Atlantean treasure,” before he obliges anyway, and walks away with the ring. It seems inconsequential but adds some excitement for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom , expected in theaters this December.

While Michael Keaton was announced to make an appearance back in April when a trailer for the movie was released, it kept some of its significant cameos under wraps, especially the biggest one at the end.

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How The Flash's Time Travel Works

This is why Superman works alone.

The Time Travel in The Flash

• How Time Travel Happens
• Can History Be Changed?
• The Consequences
• What's Next?

Warning: spoilers for The Flash are in play. If you haven’t caught this DCEU inevitable intersection just yet, you’ve been warned. 

Oh my, oh my, where do I begin? Welcome back once again to the CinemaBlend Time Travel Labs! Yes, it’s been a while since we've discussed the topic. However, thanks to the Sacred Timeline being broken not too long after we went over how The Tomorrow War’s time travel works , things kind of got weird. One could even say, they’ve gone multiversal; which means it’s time to talk about how The Flash’s time travel works! 

Yes friends, mark down one more Mike variant to keep track of, thanks to another rip in the timeline being created by Ezra Miller ’s DC hero. If only I had the power to go back and correct my own timeline, where previous cliffhanger endings didn’t exist. Maybe that opportunity will be presented in the future, but for now fuel up on those all important calories, and let’s dash into how The Flash travels through time. 

After traveling back in time during the ending of Zack Snyder’s Justice League , Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), also known as The Flash , wants to change his personal history for the better. Hijinks, and a lot of continuity breaking, ensues. 

Who's Time Traveling?

Barry Allen, Barry Allen, and… Barry Allen? Three different variants of the Scarlet Speedster are in play here: one from Present Day, one from an alternate 2013, and one that’s endured an undefined amount of time traveling back through the Speed Force. 

From When To When?

Get your notepads ready, as The Flash has quite a bit of time travel to pin down. From 2023, Barry Allen zooms back to 2004, to prevent his mom’s death. That action causes us to zoom forward to a newly rewritten 2013, and eventually back to a new variation of 2023. I’ll explain that later.

The Purpose Of Their Trip

Barry Allen just wants to save his mother Nora (Maribel Verdú), which opens a can of worms throughout time. As a result, two different Barrys try and correct the timeline through several different trips, as the new spin on Man of Steel’s Kryptonian invasion leads to the deaths of Batman ( Michael Keaton ) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle). 

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How Time Travel Happens In The Flash

If you’re a fan of The Flash in pretty much any medium, you know that the Speed Force is key to Barry Allen’s ability to travel through time. Provided that poor Barry has fueled up on enough calories to keep his status as a snack hole in check, traveling faster than the speed of light, or even time, isn’t a problem. 

By running fast enough to outpace the passage of time, Barry creates what’s called a “Chronoball.” Think of it this way: if the timeline was controlled by a mouse, The Flash is the trackball that scrolls to the point in time you want to change. The visual representation of this process actually works in that very way, as time is like a film that can be rewound through this process. 

Once Barry Allen sees the moment he wants to change, he stops and allows himself to sink into that moment through a portal. Strangely enough, this takes into account something that Back to the Future's time travel gets right, as the exact physical location of the moment in question is also taken into account when our hero travels. Of course, there are still plenty of ways he can be thrown off course, especially if a mysterious presence that couldn’t possibly be an aged and bitter version of himself tries to stop him. 

Can History Be Changed As A Result Of Time Travel In The Flash?

Oh, boy howdy, it can… but to a point! Thanks to one can of tomatoes, Nora Allen lives! Which sets off a cascade effect in The Flash’s story that wildly alters the story we thought we knew. In his world, Kal-El never made it to Earth, and his cousin Kara Zor-El/Supergirl is imprisoned by the Russian government.

So this universe has no Superman to call its own, and General Zod ( Michael Shannon ) and his Man of Steel invasion force are about to succeed. And to cap it all off, Eric Stoltz actually finished filming Back to the Future , rather than being cut from all but one frame of Robert Zemeckis’ influential sci-fi classic .

However, history is only so flexible, as the DCEU has its own version of “Fixed Points in Time,” dubbed “Inevitable Intersections.” Events titled as such cannot be changed, and in the new “Nora Lives!” timeline, Supergirl and Batman are destined to die by General Zod’s hand.  

What Are The Consequences Of Time Travel In The Flash?

The DCEU was always going to be changed after The Flash’s events. But this story actually invokes a rather interesting concept that throws everything out of whack: “Retrocausality.” As Bruce Wayne explained with some dry spaghetti, if you alter one point on a timeline, the entire thing snaps.

This causes a ripple effect that basically changes the past and the future, thanks to that action. Once Barry saved Nora from her mysterious, and still unsolved, murder, it threw events off on either side of that inflection point. Which, once again, creates the ultimate no-win scenario for Barry Allen, in which he has to choose the life of his mother or the fate of planet Earth. 

Also, if you’re a fan of how Star Trek: First Contact’s time travel works , you’ll notice that Barry Allen is protected by a temporal wake. As his mind doesn’t adjust to the new timeline, he’s as clueless as we are when Bruce Wayne all of a sudden looks like George Clooney in The Flash’s surprise ending . 

In DC’s world, if you’re a time traveler, you apparently can never go home, as apparently each change breaks that spaghetti anew. So maybe in the sequel, we can see Val Kilmer 's Batman reappear to give Barry Allen a thumb up for whatever his next adventure may be. 

More Time Travel To Come

You know something? It actually felt good to be back at it in the CinemaBlend Time Travel Labs. Which means that, conditions permitting, I think this might be the start of keeping this little corner of the universe back on the rails. 

Though since we’re in a multiverse, there’s still those versions of myself that are waiting to teach everyone how time works in Timecop and Loki Season 1. Come to think of it, I think I need to take a long, hard look at cataloging my multiversal selves and the assignments they’re awaiting.

But not before diving into another upcoming time travel assignment! Next time, prepare to dust off your fedoras and crack out your bullwhips, as we’ll hopefully be looking at how Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s time travel works. In the meantime, I’m about to try and answer yet another outstanding question about this strange new world: can we blame the awkward Max rebranding on Barry Allen? 

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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The Flash's 'Spaghetti' Time Travel and Multiverse Rules, Explained

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The following contains spoilers for The Flash , now playing in theaters.

After years of Marvel and the Arrowverse telling multiverse stories , The Flash was meant to bring the DC Studios' version to the big screen. Still, how these varied timelines and realities fit together is a very high-concept idea, which may have left general audiences confused. Michael Keaton's Bruce Wayne tries to explain it with a metaphor using spaghetti, but there are no time travel or multiverse rules by design.

In both the comics and The Flash TV series , Barry rescuing his mother from death changes the future in unexpected ways. However, it's never changed the past as well as the future, a new concept introduced in The Flash movie. It's not just that Ben Affleck is no longer Batman. Eric Stoltz was never fired from Back to the Future . Somehow Zod caught up with Kal-El's ship. And Gotham City is the safest place in the country. Naturally, Barry is confused, and so is the audience. The real answer for this new take on time-travel consequences is to fit Keaton's Batman and Sasha Calle's Supergirl into the narrative. The other barrier to comprehension is that while Bruce Wayne uses a spaghetti metaphor, the film visualizes the different DC universes as spheres.

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How The Flash Movie's Time-Travel and Multiverse Rules Work, Probably

A subtle character detail about Bruce is that he immediately understands the time travel situation, despite never meeting Metahumans. It's meant to show just how smart this Batman is. Affleck's Bruce had an inkling that mucking with time was bad, but Keaton's Bruce knows it. He even mentions "a movie" where traveling in time creates "branch realities," which may or may not be an Avengers: Endgame reference . Typically, time travel works one of two ways: changing something in the past changes the future with it, or changing the past creates an alternate timeline or reality. The spaghetti metaphor Bruce uses to explain it to the two Barry Allens is a new multiverse twist.

Bruce tells Barry that time isn't linear. Barry Allen is living his life along one strand of uncooked spaghetti. By changing the past to save his mother, he creates a "fulcrum," which spins him onto a timeline perpendicular to his own. There weren't just changes in the future, but the past as well. The third act shows the multiverse as a ballet of spheres, crashing and colliding with each other the more Barry changes his own past. This is what Bruce Wayne means when he says that "if you do it enough," you end up with "a hot mess" -- as represented by a mishmash of cooked spaghetti noodles.

It's possible that by changing the past, Barry altered the orbit of his sphere, and it collided or merged with one with no Metahumans and Keaton's Batman . The film, rather bleakly, suggests that the universe Barry spends most of the movie in is one where Zod wins. It's also possible that Zod is a remnant from Barry's original universe, and when things were set right that Earth goes back to having no Kryptonians.

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In The Flash Movie, the Nonsense Still Needs to Make Sense

The Flash's time-travel stories on The CW could result in alternate timelines, but Barry's mother's father was mostly a bootstrap paradox. In the film, Barry talks about an "ontological paradox," which means the time traveler ends up causing the thing that makes them travel back in time. It's also called a "predestination paradox," meaning the past cannot be changed. The TV series' Barry could change the past; it just broke the future in ways that were problematic. It appears that the movie's Barry doesn't just change one event in the past, but he changes his timeline's entire past.

The film doesn't do a good enough job explaining how those past changes happen. The storytellers admit it when Keaton's Bruce calls it "a crap shoot." There aren't rules Bruce understands, and whatever changes occur are randomized like rolls of the dice. Perhaps this is why George Clooney appears at the end of the film, to underscore that random element. (And, also, to score another cameo.) The intention of this randomization may have been to underscore the futility of Barry's mission to ensure "nobody dies." As another character said in a more cohesive multiverse scenario, "The hardest thing about this job is you can't always save everybody."

Comic book stories are inherently silly, like billionaire Batmen and kids who can run faster than the speed of time. Yet, these stories work best when beholden to their own logic and laws of sci-fi physics. The Flash tries to make it easier on audiences by showing that anything can happen. Unfortunately, the emotional, human story gets lost in a multiverse theme park where nothing makes sense. The Flash movie used spaghetti to introduce a new angle on a familiar storytelling device. Unfortunately, audiences may have gotten lost in the sauce.

The Flash movie is currently in theaters.

• The Flash (2023)
• DC Universe

Here’s How Time Travel Works in The Flash - Ending & Mid-Credits Scene Explained | DCEU Canon Fodder

Screen Rant

The flash’s biggest unanswered question: how did michael keaton’s batman know how time travel works.

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Warning! This article contains spoilers for The Flash. Despite answering many alternate timeline-related questions, The Flash failed to provide an explanation as to why Michael Keaton's Batman understood how time travel works. Early in the film, Barry travels back in time to save his mother's life, successfully doing so. However, it is also revealed that Barry messed with the timeline, landing in a universe where some elements are the same as Barry once knew and some things are different. By The Flash 's ending , Bruce Wayne's multiverse explanation comes full circle as Barry has to deal with the consequences.

While Batman still exists in Barry's new universe, as does a Kryptonian that crashed to Earth, it is not Ben Affleck's Batman that Barry knows nor is it Cal-El who landed in Kansas. Michael Keaton's Batman and Sasha Calle's Supergirl are the two primary heroes of The Flash 's new reality, with the former explaining through an effective spaghetti demonstration why some elements of the multiverse remain the same, some remain only slightly changed, and some are different altogether. That said, The Flash - which Rotten Tomatoes ranks as the third-best DCEU solo movie - fails to provide an explicit explanation of why Keaton's Batman knows how the multiverse and time travel works.

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How Michael Keaton's Batman Could've Figured Time Travel Out Off Screen

Unfortunately, Keaton's Batman is unlikely to return in the potential The Flash 2 story , meaning a sequel to the film could not delve into Keaton's Batman figuring out time travel. However, the film does provide some hints as to how Batman could have figured out how the multiverse works. Firstly, it is established that Ben Affleck's Batman is somewhat aware of space-time exploration, as he discusses the drawbacks of time travel with Barry in The Flash 's first act. This could mean that Bruce Wayne in every universe, due to their respective genius status', could be aware of the basic concepts of time travel.

Stemming from this, Barry spent time explaining his predicament to Keaton's Batman in The Flash. Again, because Bruce Wayne is an incredibly smart person, it is possible he began developing a process to explain the multiverse as Barry was telling his story. Another possible reason why Keaton's Batman - equipped with upgrades for The Flash - knew so much about time travel could come from how long he has been Batman. The Batman shown in The Flash has been active long enough to see Gotham become one of the safest cities on the planet, meaning he has been retired for a long time.

Related: The Flash: 28 Easter Eggs & DC Movie References

This retirement could have meant that Bruce spent his time researching many different things. As is usually the case for most curious and genius minds, time travel and alternate dimensions could have been one of these subjects, helping to inform his knowledge on the subject in The Flash . Another possibility is that Batman could have researched time travel earlier in his career stemming from the trauma of losing his parents. Just as Barry did in The Flash , Keaton's Batman could have experimented with time travel in order to save his parents, explaining why he knew how to explain the multiversal situation to Barry.

Michael Keaton's Batman Explaining Time Travel Is Needed For The Story

Regardless of how Michael Keaton's Batman knew how time travel worked, it was essential for the story. As is the case with any time travel tale, there have to be expansive exposition scenes that explain the rules and consequences of alternate dimensions to the audience via similarly unknowing characters. This was the case with Avengers: Endgame , in which many scenes focused on the various Avengers deliberating over the rules of time travel. As such, this was needed with The Flash in order to explain the core premise of the movie. In The Flash 's case, both versions of Barry were the vehicle for Batman to describe the film's rules to the audience.

However, from a less meta perspective, Keaton's Batman being the one to explain time travel works within the context of the film and its characters. For much of The Flash, Batman is positioned as the mentor to Barry Allen, be it Ben Affleck's version or Michael Keaton's. For this reason, having Bruce explain time travel to Barry not only provides a way to explain it to the audience but fits Bruce and Barry's mentor-mentee relationship. As a result, this scene begins the heartwarming relationship between Barry and Bruce in The Flash .

Similarly, Bruce also has experience with past trauma. Barry's reasoning for traveling back in time was to save his mother, something Bruce can relate to. Having Bruce then explain the consequences of Barry's actions go a long way in terms of establishing how serious the stakes of the film are, as Bruce somewhat disapproves of Barry's methods despite empathizing with his motivations. It then makes Bruce's eventual turn - deciding to help Barry - even better as the mentor role set-up for Keaton's Batman in The Flash 's time travel explanation scene comes to fruition.

Key Release Dates

Blue beetle, aquaman and the lost kingdom, joker: folie a deux, superman: legacy, the batman - part ii.

• The Flash Movie (2023)
• DC Extended Universe